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EAT MY DUST.
Former New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff reemerged recently in an unexpected location: the pages of Smithsonian magazine, where Ouroussoff profiled Rem Koolhaas for the venerable publication. Those who read the piece online may not realize that Ouroussoff is one of the writers featured in Smithsonian’s September issue, which marks the debut of the magazine’s sleek redesign initiated by editor-in-chief Michael Caruso. “The main idea was to rev it up,” Caruso told Adweek of his changes to the staid cover, layout, and contribitor’s list. Smithsonian’s monthly print circulation has already risen under Caruso—it currently sits at 2.1 million, giving Ouroussoff’s feature almost twice the reach that it would have had in the Sunday Times.

An internal New York Times email, acquired by AN today, announced that Michael Kimmelman would start this fall as the New York Times’ new chief architecture critic. Citing Kimmelman as “one of the paper’s great writers”, Jonathan Landman, deputy managing editor, wrote how Kimmelman started at the paper of record as a music critic and “swiftly morphed into an art critic.” And now after four years as a foreign correspondent, he will fill out his all-purpose critic portfolio as architecture critic.

The Architect’s Newspaper has heard from multiple sources that the New York Times may be close to naming the art critic Michael Kimmelman as the paper’s new architecture critic. Outgoing architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff resurfaced today with another far flung report, a glowing review of Steven Holl’s Vanke Center in Shenzhen, China. Will it be his last? Though Kimmelman is best known as an art critic, he has written on architecture several times in recent years during his posting in Europe, including an excellent piece on David Chipperfield’s Neues Museum in Berlin and a profile of Peter Zumthor for the New York Times Magazine.